Fantasy gaming is a competition among fantasy team owners/managers who are typically participants (i.e., individual persons) in a club or fantasy league organization. Common fantasy games include football, baseball, and basketball, among others. Indeed, any organized competitive endeavor may be modeled in a fantasy game.
Each fantasy team owner selects players from a “real-life” league (e.g., the National Football League), to create a “fantasy” team that will compete with other fantasy teams throughout the season. Player selection is usually performed in an auction or a draft which allows fantasy owners to place valuations on each player for purposes of the fantasy competition. Fantasy team owners can perform various actions with their teams that mimic the actions available to real-life team owners. For example, players may be traded during the season between fantasy owners, players who were not previously selected may be obtained as “free agents,” and underperforming players may be “waived”.
Once the season starts, fantasy team point accumulation may begin. Each of the players selected may accumulate or take away points from their fantasy team based on their real-world performance. For example, in a football fantasy league, where a player in the real-world makes a touchdown, six (6) points may be given to the fantasy team that has enrolled that particular player. However, if the same player were to throw an interception, minus two (−2) points are given to the fantasy team that has enrolled that particular player. In this way, each of the real-world players contributes to the fantasy team each week of play.
A complication of fantasy games is that each fantasy team typically includes players from multiple real-life teams, which may be engaged in game play simultaneously, at different locations and/or accessible through different transmission services. For example, a typical fantasy football team may include eight (8) or nine (9) starting players from different real-life teams, each of which may be engaged in different live games at the same time. Moreover, it may not be known when during each of the live games the particular team players are engaged in relevant (e.g., scoring related) activity. Accordingly, it is difficult for a fantasy team owner to keep track of the performance of each team member on a substantially real-time basis. Although various web-based services exist which provide for presentation of statistical and/or play-by-play information for sports-related fantasy games, web-based information can be incomplete and/or significantly delayed. Also, web-interface fantasy services do not provide for watching the events (e.g., scoring, fumbling, etc.) take place, which is part of the excitement for the team owner.